Yousef Tuqan Tuqan

Only in Jordan..

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:36:00 +0400

Only in Jordan..

Abu Dhabi: putting the “king” in Bad Parking since...

Sun, 13 May 2012 14:25:00 +0400

Abu Dhabi: putting the “king” in Bad Parking since 1971.

Eric Kayser ( the smokiest cafe in the proudly non-smoking Abu...

Sun, 13 May 2012 14:22:00 +0400

Eric Kayser ( the smokiest cafe in the proudly non-smoking Abu Dhabi Mall) tried to charge me 16 AED for this many shrimps today. For reals.

I had a polite word and they agreed that it was ridiculous as well. I even had two waiters thank me for complaining because maybe then “the management” would stop these ludicrous portions.

And there’s no local water option. Only Evian.

Sucks.

15 emails (and counting) asking me for my feedback for an event...

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:24:15 +0400

15 emails (and counting) asking me for my feedback for an event I didn’t even attend.

I know, Tumblr, I know! It’s been ages since we’ve...

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:20:05 +0400

I know, Tumblr, I know! It’s been ages since we’ve talked and I’m sorry. I’ll be back this week with proper posts again. In the meantime, please busy yourself with this photo of Terence Trent D’Arby.

This is what happens when you send a Palestinian to the...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:49:06 +0400

This is what happens when you send a Palestinian to the supermarket alone. #NabulsisGoneWild.

This homeboy was my neighbor on the flight back from Jeddah.

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:28:16 +0400

This homeboy was my neighbor on the flight back from Jeddah.

Notes from Jeddah Airport

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:47:15 +0400

“It does not have to be like this,” I think to myself as I watch the salad slip off my plastic fork and splatter onto the plate. “This is such a rich country, surely they could make more of an effort with the buffet.”

There’s precious little else to eat in here, just some horrible buns with tuna paste or horrible buns with chicken paste. There’s no low-carb options in here besides the runny salad, the yellow chicken and a burnt brown meat, I think it’s beef.

One of the true measures of civilization of any place should be the quality of the low-carb selection of any buffet, not including nuts. Of course here, I can’t even get the nuts.

I am attempting to eat salad that is so soggy that I cannot even stick my clear plastic fork in it. Similarly, the plastic fork is so thin that any attempt to spoon the salad onto it means it slips off. So instead I find myself using two forks – one to shovel the salad onto the fork, and one to try and balance the green and red slime carefully into my mouth. I look undignified.

I may look undignified, but at least I don’t sound undignified. Next to me, a Frenchman is on the phone with his colleague Mary, expressing his regret at being mean and rude to his Saudi clients earlier on today. “Perhaps I should not have been so negatif, but someone has to be the bad guy. I don’t know how these people got their jobs. Maybe I should be their executif. Then I would fire them all and their company would have to shut down.” I can’t imagine what they didn’t like about him.

The chicken is yellow. Roast chicken, and it’s yellow. If you think the fork had a hard time with the salad, don’t try the chicken. It’s back to basics over here – fingers are the only way forward. I am actually tearing a piece of chicken apart in an airport lounge with my bare hands. In a suit jacket. With a briefcase next to me.

I should be on a plane. I should be on my flight back to Dubai right now, but instead I am sitting in the Oasis Lounge of King Abdulaziz Airport in Jeddah. This flight delay, and this salad, are the perfect embodiment of a new law that was invented this morning.

The law states that “if you have two glasses of champagne and are then upgraded to Business Class on an Emirates A380, your day can only go downhill from there.”

The day’s not gone downhill as much as fallen off a cliff in the late afternoon. From that cherished upgrade at 07:00 to about 19:00, everything was fine. I had my boarding pass, and I was going home. I could have a bite on the plane, take a nap and be in my bed by 1:30.

Instead, my flight is now two hours delayed, and after standing in line with 100 little men wrapped in towels on their way home from Umrah, my only refuge is this Oasis Lounge – a waiting hall full of men who look surprisingly similar to me.

Most of them are in dark suits, but the trendier among them (me included) are wearing a suit jacket, and some variation of jeans. We all have our own road-warrior equipment that helps us cope with being in a place we don’t to be, listening to people we don’t want to hear - noise-cancelling headphones, iPads in the hands of men as old as my father playing Angry Birds, and laptops with miserable Excel sheets opened up before them. The last time I was in here, I was streaming a Liverpool match on my laptop. I felt superior.

There is nothing glamorous or successful about being in here. We all look like well-paid schoolchildren who are sitting in a cafeteria. Here, the illusion of someone actually giving a shit about you is well and truly shattered. For drinks, we have a choice of small juice cartons, 7up or water. And chocolate milk.

My French neighbor has just taken off his tie – his knowing colleague looks at him mockingly and says, “I don’t know why you kept it on for so long,” as if perhaps by taking his tie off earlier on in the day, he was slightly less institutionalized than his colleague. Be careful mate, one day he might be the executif of the company – you’re going to want to stay on his good side.

This is ridiculous. We are all staring at one another, thinking to ourselves what we did to get ourselves here. How we never thought this is what our high-flying business traveller lifestyle would look.

But this is this week.

Next week, I might have to come back here.

I’ll get to the airport early, drink my champagne and against my better judgment, silently pray for an upgrade.

Watching Midnight In Paris today makes you want to do two...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:25:57 +0400

Watching Midnight In Paris today makes you want to do two things: drink Champagne & go to Paris. As I can only do one of those tonight, cheers!!

Designing a tumbler out of.. tumblr I’ve had this...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:24:00 +0400

Designing a tumbler out of.. tumblr

I’ve had this Starbucks tumbler for months now, and the idea’s that you take out the generic piece of paper and design your own tumbler.

I’ve been staring at it for months thinking of what clever thing I could do with it, and then it finally hit me. Why not design my tumbler with tumblr?

I created a visualization of my Tumblr feed using the very cool Tumblr Mosaic Viewer - printed it, cut it out and voila!

"When she met Stratfor's man in Cairo, he spoke no Arabic, had never been to Egypt before, and had to ask her for directions to Tahrir Square."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:03:31 +0400

"When she met Stratfor's man in Cairo, he spoke no Arabic, had never been to Egypt before, and had to ask her for directions to Tahrir Square.":

This is a great article by The Atlantic on Stratfor, and how nobody but Wikileaks actually considers them to be a CIA-For-Hire.

Stratfor also sometimes pays “sources” for information. Wikileaks calls this “secret cash bribes,” hints that this might violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and demands “political oversight.”

For comparison’s sake, The Atlantic often sends our agents into such dangerous locales as Iran or Syria. We call these men and women “reporters.” Much like Statfor’s agents, they collect intelligence, some of it secret, and then relay it back to us so that we may pass it on to our clients, whom we call “subscribers.” Also like Stratfor, The Atlantic sometimes issues “secret cash bribes” to on-the-ground sources, whom we call “freelance writers.” We also prefer to keep their cash bribes (“writer’s fees”) secret, and sometimes these sources are even anonymous.

Very well-written.

Follow up will be for the hole year

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:15:07 +0400

I received this spam email from a company called Direct English, which offers courses in Business Writing.

Now I know that if you want to be “down with the kids” these days, then you can throw grammar & puncutation out the window, but COME ON!!! YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TEACHING F#@%ING ENGLISH!!!!

Read it and weep, folks..

Dear Valuable Customers,
It’s my great Pleasure to announce that we do have a new offer plan of Business Writing followed by Coaching Mail.

Coaching mails is to guide the employees after having his/her 20 Hours Training in Business Writing, the coach will follow-up with the employee by mail all his/her Business writing of course without mentioning any of the confidentially goals as ( Numbers, Names , Company names)

Follow up will be for the hole year, our coach will be available in his online mail to guide the employees and correct all his/her mistake and send back to him/her CC both Managers yours and ours.

Note that the price of the 20 hours Business writing is 2000 AED per candidate.
Would you believe that this price will be same even with the Coach Email whole year

Direct English Aim is only to develop this employee who has usually a panic in sending Formal Letters in English.

I started counting the spelling mistakes & grammatical errors, but stopped at 30..

Publicis Groupe Acquires Flip Media, Leading Middle Eastern Digital Agency

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:20:05 +0400

And just in case you missed it, we’ve had a huge piece of news announced this week.

A contracting company was asked to stencil on the side of a fuel...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:17:12 +0400

A contracting company was asked to stencil on the side of a fuel tanker: Diesel Fuel in Arabic and No Smoking in Arabic.

This is what came back.

And they even managed to make a spelling mistake.

danielfogg: A collection of photographs of my grandfather,...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:25:57 +0400

The Hatter

Top Hats

Balance

The Process I

The Process II

danielfogg:

A collection of photographs of my grandfather, Leslie Levi Fogg taken between 1978 and 1980 in Stockport, England. My grandfather was a hatter and he had hands like dustbin lids. He made felt hats by hand for his entire working life. In order to shape the felt to the mould, he would need to place his hands in boiling water without using any protective gloves. In the early 1980s, work place safety regulation was introduced which banned the process of making felt hats by hand, making my grandfather one of the last people in the world to produce top hats and Trilbies this way.

Hat makers had been around for centuries. Their profession was once part of the fabric of British industrial society. Their process even coined a famous phrase…

“Mad as a hatter” is a colloquial phrase used in conversation to refer to a crazy person. In 18th and 19th century England mercury was used in the production of felt, which was used in the manufacturing of hats common of the time. People who worked in these hat factories were exposed daily to trace amounts of the metal, which accumulated within their bodies over time, causing some workers to develop dementia caused by mercury poisoning. Thus the phrase “Mad as a Hatter” became popular as a way to refer to someone who was perceived as insane. (Source: Wikipedia).

Luckily my grandfather wasn’t mad. He was just a hatter.

Finally completed Modern Warfare 3. The final battle scenes take...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:30:06 +0400

Finally completed Modern Warfare 3. The final battle scenes take place in Burj Al Arab! Fought my way up from the fish tanks to the helipad!

Somewhere in Sweden, a newspaper layout editor is laughing till...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:16:02 +0400

Somewhere in Sweden, a newspaper layout editor is laughing till he wets his pants. (via @SariTuqan)

Simply disgusting. On every...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:53:53 +0400

Simply disgusting. On every level.

handsup-thumbsdown:

Inter-Emirate ridiculous spending competition.

Abu Dhabi one-upping Dubai with a night out at Etoiles.

Behold! A 387,988 AED bill from Cavalli Club. This is so...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:24:47 +0400

Behold! A 387,988 AED bill from Cavalli Club.

This is so offensive on so many levels, I cannot even begin to talk about it without spitting.

(via THE_47th )

Playing Liar’s Dice in a Kowloon drinking den with...

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:42:32 +0400

Playing Liar’s Dice in a Kowloon drinking den with @Metaxas & @MeredithTuqan